On the 28th March, Frances Yeo, curator of STEAM, Lydiard House and the museum and art gallery will impart to us the latest news on our museum and art gallery.
Rather than the customary Zoom for this talk we’ll be in the council chamber in the civic offices.
Museum and Art Swindon – the Art Deco civic offices on Euclid Street
The rebranded and relocated museum and art Swindon is set to open in the spring of 2024.
The Swindon collection of modern British art
The Swindon collection of modern British srt consists of around 600 works of art and 300 studio ceramics, made between 1880 and 2018 by artists who lived and worked in Britain.
The art collection includes two-dimensional and three-dimensional material, but does not currently include film, large sculpture or installation.
There is a small collection of modern sculpture by artists including Michael Craig-Martin, Stephen Tomlin, H Carleton Attwood and Roger Leigh.
The paintings
This collection includes modern and contemporary oil and acrylic paintings by most major movements in British art. These include:
- St Ives (represented by Ben Nicholson, Alfred Wallis and Terry Frost)
- Unit One (John Nash, Edward Wadsworth and Graham Sutherland)
- Bloomsbury Group (Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant)
- Camden Town Group (Sylvia Gosse, Robert Bevan, Spencer Gore)
- The School of London (Leon Kossoff, Howard Hodgkin and David Bomberg)
- Pop Art (Richard Hamilton, Allan Jones and Richard Smith)
- Abstraction (Gillian Ayres, John Hoyland and Roger Hilton)
Museum and art gallery background
Swindon Museum and Art Gallery closed on 18 March 2020 thanks to Covid restrictions. But then in July 2021 there came an announcement that the entire museum and art collections were going into storage until the building of the art pavilion in the planned (long-term – a decade) cultural quarter. Until then, the plan was that Swindonians would get access to the collections via art on tour and museums without walls.
There then followed a long and hard-fought campaign by the Friends and by members of the public. The upshot of which was a proposal to convert the first floor of the Civic Offices in Euclid St into Swindon MAG.
And now, four years on from the initial closure, it’s set to open this spring on the first floor of the Civic Offices – rebranded as:
The old SMAG website hasn’t yet been rebranded. But there is:
1. A Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/MuseumandArtGallery/about
2. An Instagram account to follow.
3. And ditto a Twitter/X account.
In related material see this blog on Born Again Swindonian about Swindon’s famous crocodile – or gharial.
For information on more of our talks and events go here.
Date/Time
Date(s) - 28/03/2024
7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Categories
